As Susamaru and Yahaba launched their assault on Tamayo's mansion, Muzan was holding a meeting with both of the aforementioned Jackson Brothers at the Dimensional Infinity Fortress: George, the elder, and Thaddeus, the younger. The expansive realm was used by Muzan as his personal headquarters, and he often utilized it for meetings and for experimentation. Their meeting was at a table inside a relatively normal meeting room. Muzan began the meeting by congratulating them, telling them, "I congratulate you on your efforts. Having over 250,000 active demons running around in the New World thanks to you and your Knights of the Moon is no easy feat. Even with me granting some of my Upper Moons the same Progeneration ability we have, I've only been able to muster up around 50,000, and as you know, with those pesky Demon Slayers we have to contend with in Japan, those numbers always fluctuate greatly. I generally keep up a rate of 100 to 150 new demons a year, though I don't trust them with the same reproductive capabilities you do."
"We've always agreed to disagree on that," Thaddeus, who had pale skin and dark black hair with orange eyes, replied. "We can attribute about 75,000 of our demons currently to personal direct creation. Everyone else was born. We've been thinking about implanting a higher sex drive in our demons."
"Not a bad idea," Muzan admitted. "Perhaps one day, I could follow your ways. Your idea of having female demons fornicate with male humans to be impregnated before killing them takes a bit of time for a payoff, but I like the odds of it either creating a new demon or creating more food for us."
"If it's a male," George added. "We feed it to our demons. If it's female, it's another addition to our army. We've had a bit of trouble with some female demons having attachment issues to their food or their offspring, but we can iron it out with more time." All three of them nodded in approval despite the rather horrific implications of George's statement. "Having our male demons fornicate with female humans doesn't generally return as good of a result, since the pregnancy is not supervised by demons, but it's still a good way for our kind to let off steam, and the baby can devour its human mother if it's a boy, assuming the mother does not become a suicide out of shame." All three laughed at the suffering of humans, indicating their harsh treatment of them.
"I knew it was a good idea for me to turn you two in 1588 when I arrived in America on my first overseas trip," Muzan remarked. He had always been the most proud of the achievements of the Jackson brothers, who originally were Spaniards named Tadeo and Jorge Juncosa. "I'm glad you guys are gonna stay here a full year."
"We might as well," Thaddeus replied. "It takes us three months to get from America to Japan and vice-versa. The 22 remaining of the Knights of the Moon will be here soon, now that we have the 1st and 2nd Knights here with us. The Demon Slayer Corps will have no fucking clue what hit them when we show them how America does it."
"I intend on supporting your efforts in the Southern United States," Muzan confirmed to them. "Once we finally succeed in giving my own demons the same Limited Sunlight Resistance of the Americans, I'll be sure to dispatch a force to you guys. Your Confederacy will become a reality once more."
"The Yankees won't know what fuckin' hit em," George remarked. "We'll crush those Lincolnites like bugs."
…
"Stop splattering dust on me," Yahaba insisted to Susamaru outside the mansion. "You're being too messy!"
"Oh, shut it," she replied with some annoyance in her voice. "Your kimono's fine. Calm the fuck down and focus on these guys." She then tossed two handballs into the house. "Take this!"
James barely dodged one of them as it made an unnatural left turn midair before bouncing off the walls. "What the fuck?! How did it move like that?!" Then, both he and Tanjiro noticed a ball zipping for Yushiro's head, but it was too late. Both of them shouted, "YUSHIRO!" By now, Nezuko had taken refuge in the basement.
The ball blasted his head completely off and caused his body to fall to the ground. Tamayo grabbed him and yelled out, "Yushiro! No! Come on, start healing!"
Meanwhile, as Tanjiro deflected the handballs, a vision played in James' head of a memory of his past: a man whose head was taken clean off by a cannonball right in front of him. As he tried to remain focused and pulled his shotgun off of his back, he began to see Union soldiers around him, seemingly marching through the house at loud gunfire and cannon fire outside. He began shouting in English, "Fuck… Fuck, where's my Springfield?! Where's my fuckin' Springfield?! Why ain't we fallin' back?! We're gonna get fuckin' massacred!" In his head, the hallucination felt completely real, and as one of the soldiers was brutally decapitated by a cannonball much like Yushiro had been, his blood and brains splattering his face behind him, he screamed in fear. "TOMMY, NO!" Two more men nearby fell to the ground, hit by Confederate bullets. "THEY'RE FUCKING MASSACRING US!"
As he had his rather vivid flashback, Tanjiro was able to impale a handball on his sword. "Hah! I did it!" However, the handball then began to vibrate, catching him off-guard as it then bounced up and hit him in the head before flying off of his sword. "Agh, shit! How is she doing any of this?!" He then looked to James, who was still screaming. "James! James, what the fuck are you doing?! JAMES! ANSWER ME, DAMN IT!"
The veteran snapped out of his flashback with the calling of his name, looking around to see what had happened. "Shit… It… I…" He then realized what he was up against and cocked his shotgun, firing two blasts at the handballs Susamaru threw, striking and destroying one of them. "I'm gonna try and shoot every one I can!"
As Yushiro began to reform his head, he turned to James and Tanjiro and told them, "Hang on a second! She's not the one controlling the movements of the handballs! It's that other demon!"
Tanjiro asked, "You mean that guy that was next to her for a bit?!"
"Yeah," he replied before he pulled two pieces of paper out of his shirt, still lying in Tamayo's arms, before throwing them at their heads. "Whatever you do, don't let these pieces of paper fall from your heads!"
Meanwhile, outside, Susamaru shouted as her two handballs returned to her, "How about we up the ante here?!" She then stripped her kimono off of her upper body, revealing a black cloth that bound her chest but exposed her midriff. "A couple extra arms never hurt no one… No one except you guys!" In an instant, her body sprouted four additional arms under her normal arms, two on each side.
As Tanjiro and James looked to Susamaru as she threw six handballs at them, they saw what Yushiro had seen. The other demon they were fighting was using some kind of power of his own to guide each ball, and with Yushiro's powers, they could see a physical manifestation of this power via otherwise invisible red arrows. As Nezuko ran back upstairs to join the fray, she dodged two of the handballs. "I got an idea," James yelled to Tanjiro. "I'm gonna go find that fucker with them damn arrow things and pump 'em full of poisoned birdshot! You and your sister keep protectin' Tamayo and Yushiro! If I can blast 'em to bits, her handballs won't be guided anymore!"
"Sounds like a plan to me," Tanjiro replied, cutting a handball into half with his sword. As James ran to another entrance to the house, Nezuko managed to kick a ball despite the strength with which they had been thrown, amazing the others. "Holy shit! My sister kicked the ball and she was fine!"
Once he emerged outside in the rear of the house, he quickly reloaded his shotgun back up to its max capacity of five rounds plus an additional round in the chamber before putting it back on his shoulder and pulling his revolver out to reload it as well. He then scanned the trees, including the rather large one in the back that housed the treehouse. However, in the back, he felt no presence, so he kept looking. As he rounded a corner and began to approach the front, he suddenly felt a fast-moving presence behind him and turned around, pointing the revolver right at an arrow heading for him. As he fired, the bullet seemingly turned around and came right back at him as a much smaller second arrow emerged from the first, catching the bullet and aiming it at James' chest. "Agh, fuck! You shot me with my own fuckin' bullet!"
As James fell to the ground in pain despite his chest healing itself since his revolver did not carry poisoned rounds, Yahaba jumped down from a tree nearby and exclaimed to him, "You must be the other fugitive. Tamayo is a long-sought-after traitor demon of my master's, but you are new. Even so, he has not underestimated your danger to his cause!" He then closed both of the eyes on his hands, triggering another round of two arrows that picked James up from the ground.
As he flew up into the air before being dropped, James holstered his revolver and pulled his shotgun out, screaming at Yahaba, "EAT LEAD, KID!" Just before hitting the ground, James fired two blasts at Yahaba. Then, he hit the cold hard dirt, injuring himself and causing an excruciating amount of pain. "MOTHERFUCKER!"
"Your profanity only gets you so far," Yahaba shouted back. "And since you keep getting me filthy with dirt and dust, you will die!"
"I don't think I will," James replied back as he staggered to his feet, his wounds healing themselves as he did. "I told you to eat lead, and you're gonna eat lead!" He fired another two rounds at Yahaba from his shotgun. Yahaba was able to deflect some of the shot, but not all of it, and he stumbled to the ground. "That's the beauty of shotguns! There's so many pellets I bet y'all can't deflect 'em all!"
"No matter," Yahaba replied as he slowly stood up. "Tell me, what's your na-?" Then, he stopped dead in his tracks as he felt a searing pain inside his chest. "What… Agh, what did you do to me?!"
As he clutched his chest, James answered his interrupted question. "My name is James Colby," he informed him as the wisteria-coated birdshot pellets began to do their work. He followed by shooting Yahaba again a fifth time to speed up his death. "And you can go fuck yourself." Finally, he finished him with a sixth and final blast to the head, splattering it all over the ground. After putting the shotgun back on his shoulder, he grabbed his revolver and ran back to the front to assist the others now that Susamaru's guided handballs got neutered.
As he ran to the front, Nezuko and Susamaru were locked in a fierce kickball competition, kicking handballs back and forth at each other with immense power and increasing speed. Tanjiro called out to him, "We got her surrounded, but we don't know how to deal with her! I cut her arms off, but they-"
"Grew right back," James finished his sentence for him. "Of course. Well, that other demon's dead. My wisteria birdshot did the trick, and just to be sure, I blasted his head off." He then looked out to the kickball competition. "Damn, your sister's powerful for a demon who ain't never drank blood. As for that girl she's facin', she looks kinda… Ya know."
Tanjiro looked over at him in some disbelief, asking him, "Are… Are you saying you think a demon looks hot?"
"Come on," James replied. "I have the right to be attracted to some members of my kind. It don't mean I'm gonna spare her, though. At least, not for that reason." He then turned to Tamayo. "Hey, you said you wanted more blood, right?"
"Yeah, why?"
"I got an idea," James proposed. "But I need you to keep her distracted and disoriented with your illusion and hallucination Blood Demon Art." He then turned to Yushiro. "As for you, I need you to hold her down when I give the go-ahead." He then cut his arm again with a knife before dabbing his free hand with blood to draw a triangle on the ground.
"I don't like where this is going," Yushiro replied to him, highly skeptical of whatever plan he was composing.
"Give him a chance," Tamayo disagreed with him. "He knows his stuff. So, James, what are you casting?"
"A spell that protects me from hallucinogenic and illusory Blood Demon Arts," James replied.
As James cast his spell in the background, Nezuko and Susamaru continued their kickball game. "Mmmh! Mmmh! Mmmh!" Nezuko then kicked the handball one final time before it hit a wall right behind a stunned Susamaru. The force with which she had kicked it caused her to miss it completely, and she was amazed at her power.
"Holy shit," Susamaru remarked, highly impressed with her. "You should join us. Fuck your brother and those fugitives! You'd be a wonderful ally of our master! If this is how powerful you are without blood, imagine how much more powerful you'd be with it!"
"This fight ends now," Tamayo interjected as she cut into her arm with her nails, drawing blood to summon her Blood Demon Art. "Susamaru is your name, isn't it? Tell me, why do you think Kibutsuji Muzan keeps us demons divided?"
"Don't you fucking dare insult my master," Susamaru shouted back in anger, deeply offended by her remarks. "You don't deserve to have his name escape your lips, whore!"
"He has us always squabble over territory," Tamayo further told her as James began to slowly walk over to Susamaru. Meanwhile, Nezuko herself began to doze in and out of sleep, a side effect of her Blood Demon Art on the girl. "He doesn't let you have true free will."
"There's a damn good reason Progenitors like us fightin' each other," James added as he got closer, carrying his revolver in his right hand and a knife in the other. "They're afraid. They're afraid of what our kind could accomplish if we united against 'em. They're too fuckin' cowardly to let us be free. Just look at me and Tamayo over there. We don't have to be monsters, and you know it."
"You're lying," Susamaru shouted back at both of them. "Both of you are! My master is a good man, and he gave me the powers I deserved! Don't you fucking dare tell these slanderous lies about Master Kibutsuj-!" She immediately covered her mouth with all six of her hands as she realized the grave mistake she had made by saying her name.
"Now you fucked up," Tamayo told her in a rare moment of her uttering profanity. "You know what happens when a demon mentions his name to someone they're not supposed to, right?"
"No, no!" Susamaru began to panic as she realized she was most likely about to die from the Curse of the Progenitors taking hold of her. "Master, no! Please forgive me!"
"There's a way outta this," James told her as she screamed. He then waved to Yushiro from behind, causing him to run up to him. "Yushiro, hold her down!" He quickly reached them and grabbed a hold of Susamaru, who was by now so disoriented and fearful she barely resisted. "There's a fifty-fifty chance this'll work, Susamaru, but that's better than guaranteed death."
"What are you doing?!" Susamaru, still in fear, had no clue what James was about to do to her. "I can't die! It's a mistake I won't make again! Master, give me another chance!"
James then cut his arm again with his knife, which was followed by him running around Susamaru to make the blood fall into a pattern. When he reached back to where he started, the pattern was that of a six-pointed star, with Yushiro and Susamaru in the middle. "Yushiro, this won't affect you since you're not cursed." With that reassurance, James took his knife and stabbed the ground in front of a still screaming Susamaru, whose skin was slowly turning red, a sign that James had to hurry up before Muzan's curse got to her first.
"Oh God, no! Don't kill me, Master!"
"By the Grace of the Spirits," James began his chant. "I ask them to free this child of God from the chains imposed on her by her Progenitor! Release this woman from his grasp, and eradicate all traces of the curse placed upon her! I cast the Progenitor Release Spell upon you!"
With a loud scream, a bright red light surrounded Susamaru as Yushiro quickly jumped off of her, running to James' side as the light engulfed her. Her yells were bloodcurdling, but to James, they were actually a good sign, as it meant that she was surviving the spell so far. Yushiro asked him, "Holy shit, what did you cast?!"
"The Progenitor Release Spell," James explained as her screaming continued. "It's only got a fifty-fifty chance of workin'! It frees a demon from a Progenitor's Curse! If it don't work, they did anyway!"
Finally, after a good half of a minute of screaming and a show of red lights, Susamaru stopped as the light faded away, and she closed her eyes, her four extra arms turning into dust but her normal body remaining. As she began to fall, James quickly caught her in his arms as Tanjiro and Tamayo ran over. The former was amazed to see the spell, and asked, "Hey, what happened to her?! Is she alive?!"
"She is," James remarked with excitement and a large grin on his face. "She survived! No fuckin' way! This is the first time I've successfully released a demon!"
"Let's get her inside," Tamayo told him. "Daybreak will be coming. She can't be outside then, after all."
"Not yet at least," James added as they all walked back to the house, still carrying her in his arms. "I'll see what I can do to give her my ability to walk in the sun. Maybe givin' her some of my blood will do somethin'."
